2000 and counting

To many Americans, one of the most puzzling things about the Beltway brawl last month over disaster relief was the insistance by Republican leadership that help for flooded North Dakotans be tied to Census 2000.

The census? That boring decennial national head count? That mundane, constitutionally mandated enumeration of every man, woman and child? What’s the big deal and what’s the problem?

Well, the big deal is the the census is a very big deal, if for no other reason than that it determines how many members of Congress, and thus how much clout, each state gets. The problem is that the 1990 census, while respectably accurate overall, revealed a continuing and unacceptible trend: certain groups, rural Americans and Blacks especially, are habitually undercounted and the gap is growing.

And, the census is getting extraordinarily expensive. The last one cost $2.6 billion, with much of that going to conduct house-to-house follow-ups on the 35 percent of Americans who did not mail back their initial forms. The Census Bureau estimates Census 2000, if done with 1990 techniques and if it attempts to correct the chronic undercount, could run as high as $4.8 billion.

Congressional leadership has made it clear there is no way they’ll spend that much, yet, paradoxically, leadership also is staunchly opposed to a proposal the Census Bureau has to save as much as $1 billion by augmenting the follow-up with sampling and statistical analysis.

With overblown rhetoric that would cause most folks to blush, opponents call the plan, which has the endorsement of the esteemed National Academy of Sciences, a “risky scheme of statistical guessing.” This from the same politicians who use sampling and statistical analysis to gauge the public’s mood before every election, who use these proven and finely honed techniques to declare victory five minutes after the polls close.

Unconstitutional, they say. That sacred document requires an actual enumeration. Yes, it does, but if the Constitution were followed to the letter, felons could buy machine guns off the shelf and any Mormon male with enough hair on his chest could have 16 wives. Were they to speak today, the Founders might say “Golly, we had no idea the country would get so big, the population so mobile and so suspicious of government. Just get the most accurate tally possible.”

The most undercounted segment of the population is Black America and, as the recent revisitation of the abominable Tuskegee Syphillis Study reminded us, Blacks have just cause to be wary when someone from the government comes knocking on the door to ask a lot of personal questions. Reluctance to count them better raises a spectre of racism the GOP doesn’t need and the nation can’t abide.

GOP leadership says the main reason they’re against sampling is that the census is used to determine everything from Congressional districts and the distribution federal money to the makeup of state legislatures and local school boards, so the Clinton Administration will find a way to manipulate the numbers to its advantage.

Certainly, this administration is no stranger to the concept of manipulation, but the charge is a little hard to take from the Party of Watergate, the mother of all manipulations. A bipartisan approach to funding the census and a nonpartisan approach to overseeing it is the logical solution.

But logic is exactly what’s missing here. Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut is one Republican who’s appaled at his leadership’s stubbornness and shortsightedness.

“It’s embarrassing to have my party opposed, supposedly on scientific grounds, to something scientists support,” Shays said the other day. “Politically, it’s a mistake. The big gainers from a better 1990 census would have been the West and the South — definitely not Democratic strongholds. Leadership is dead wrong on this.”

Dead wrong, but there’s time to get right. The Census Bureau will stage a dress rehearsal of the new techniques in a few selected regions next year. Congress should give the trial run a fair hearing and then decide either to go with a head count that is accurate and affordable or to stick with the exorbitant and flawed. As it stands, Census 2000 is a disaster waiting to happen.